pouët.net

As far as I can gather, no-one really uses IPFS. In fact that could probably be the universal answer to any technical question about NFTs:

"yes, in theory it could be implemented in a way that doesn't suck, but in practice nobody does that, and even if they did, there's still a more fundamental conceptual level of suck that overrides it."

Even if you could prove that an NFT is the only copy of an artwork that exists on the blockchain (and somehow closed all the 'what if you change one pixel' loopholes), it still doesn't prove that the artist who made the artwork has authorised it being there. But then again, maybe that's okay, because nobody ever set any ground rules for who can legitimately put something on the blockchain. Maybe you're supposed to be rewarding the person who first had the idea of putting a thing on the blockchain, rather than the person who made the thing? Apparently you can make NFTs of Olive Garden restaurants without actually being Olive Garden yourself. Some people said that was a joke. Maybe it is a joke but it's also a notable enough piece of internet performance art that it has value among the weirdos who assign value to these things? As kb said, nothing means anything.

I tried IPFS at one point in the past and downloaded some manga stickers. It's an interesting idea but it's slow as f- and practically useless unless a particular file gets momentum which will never happen to anything but porn.

Once I also put 256b on the blockchain for which you may hate and ridicule me :) Full disclosure. I don't update those IDs anymore but since nothing is ever truly gone from the chain they are probably still in there somewhere.

Isn't IPFS basically just BitTorrent but you can't control what you seed? (what could possibly go wrong)

As I said I'm not into it, but it seems like the tech is work-in-progress and evolving rapidly. For example, you can put your NFT on-chain in newer projects (as opposed to off-chain). Those are technical details that I believe can be sorted out at one point.

My biggest concern, however, is environmental impact of operating common blockchain solutions (which was of course stated hundreds of times). There are promises it's gonna be solved (in Ethereum 2.0) but it's yet to be seen. Before that I would not recommend playing with it. Too much risk for individuals and for the planet ;P

Yeah, that's been a running joke for years now. The tech is there, the math is sound (even if it kinda bakes "pyramid scheme" into the system even more instead of trying to get away from it) but the economic incentives to stay at PoW are still way stronger, sadly.

@kb_: You seed what you download so yeah it's much like bittorrent. I think you can remove stuff by digging through some cache or something.

This is an amazing summary of the entire thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

That video deserves all the credit, it is fantastic.

What's the TL;DR of the video? It's 2 hours long

It is really worth those 2 hours.

how many NFTs?

I am 20 minutes into the video but so far he has done a pretty poor job of explaining the 2008 financial collapse and he doesn’t explain the so called “solution” at all. He concludes by saying that the banks were “too big to fail” and that they knew that the government would bail them out.

The 2008 financial collapse was “fixed” by Quantitative Easing (creating money out of thin air). Which has only made the problem worse, and which is one of the reasons why people don’t put their money into a savings account anymore. They will litterally put it into anything else, even dumb NFT monkeys. Yes Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme and a casino, but so is the entire financial system. The NFT monkeys are a symptom of a much bigger problem, not the problem itself.

This is the fundamental problem: FRED Money Supply

I'm not an economist, but I'm pretty sure you shouldn't look at those graphs in isolation.

AFAIK central bank controls money supply via quantitative easing based on several factors, like monetary exchange equation (of course a more complicated version of it).

And yes, the "velocity of money" dropped sharply due to Covid, so we surely have a problem.
But well, it's hard to say if crypto/NFT is any solution here.

There is a proverb that says "a drowning man will clutch at a straw" and I think it may fit very well here.

He does get to that point by the end.

Ofcourse, but it’s the simplest way to visualise the problem. The fundamental problem is that we need permanent growth, because of the rent component. Whenever rent is introduced you start the process of creating something which doesn’t exist. At which point the system is no longer backed up by actual value, but by imaginary value. Add to this that the dollar is no longer backed up by anything, like Gold. This has given the Central Banks, such as the FED which is not a government agency, free reign to print as much money as they like, as long as they don’t spook the market or the general public.

This fairytale is coming to a close, just look at the ricing prices around you. This is not temporary, nor is it the result of “logistical problems due to Covid”. It’s because we are printing money like there is no tomorrow.

@Gargaj

Thanks, I will skip ahead a little.

Correction: The interest component, not the rent component. That’s me mixing up Dutch (rente) and English.

The financial crisis explanation isn't meant to be the point of the video anyway, just to provide context for the future parallels he draws with the intent of replacing a bad system with worse.

Sure but without explaining the current financial system you can’t explain Cryptocurrencies.

Does the video go into Central Bank Digital Currencies?

It's a great video. He makes the really good point that while some tout cryptocurrencies and NFTs as freedom from exploitation, it's also just another system that can be abused for the purpose of exploitation. That's why it's just as bad as the aggressive re-selling of debt which led to the 2008 financial crisis.

Actually, I can see one positive thing of this crypto/NFT experiment. It's true kids/gen-z gets overexcited and get scammed, but it surely forces them to think or read about economy, how money "works" (or not) etc... and thanks to this learnings, I'm sure in the future they will be much better off than millenials today.

Yes, because humanity has a great track record of fucking things up and then learning the correct things from it.

On the other hand, maybe it causes them to think this is "just how it works" and lead them to create the digital-marketplace-economics equivalent of Mad Max.

Some say this Matrix operates on cycles, nothing is really new, just different.



Roughly 100 years between those pictures. The “spanish flu” was followed by The Great Depression.

you sure ain't holding any rights on these pictures, do you? ;)
better buy these NFTs!

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/meta-girlfriends-nft

Link without further comment from me. Fill yer boots.